fork bomb attack

[Iago Rubio]

On Sat, 2005-03-19 at 19:04 +0000, Carlos Rodrigues wrote:
> Dave Jones wrote:
[snip]
> Maybe those could be chosen for Fedora/RedHat too, and let people with a 
> need for huge numbers of processes increase them. Those kind of people 
> should also know how to do "man ulimit".

I think it's the other way around.

A user that should give shell access to untrusted third parties on a
machine with valuable resources, is not a user but a sysadmin and should
know - at least - how to set less permissive ulimits.

Desktop users sitting in front of their single-user PCs, should not know
a word about "man ulimit" to use their boxes at full power.

> When one advocates in favor of unix-like systems (as opposed to
> Windows systems) mentioning "convenience vs. security", it is
> embarassing to be given counter-examples like fork-bombs.

I would be very funny to listen to someone saying, "Yeah, I picked 50
virus through Outlook this month, but if I get a shell account in your
box I can fork bomb it." 
-- 
Iago Rubio